


Mouth to Mouth

by OssaCordis



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Cooking, Everyone just has a lot of feelings, First Kiss, Food, M/M, Magical Realism, Tea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-09-02
Updated: 2013-09-02
Packaged: 2017-12-25 11:00:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/952288
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/OssaCordis/pseuds/OssaCordis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John tastes emotions. Sherlock never cooks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Mouth to Mouth

**Author's Note:**

> The modern-day incarnations of Sherlock Holmes, John Watson, et al. belong to Steven Moffat, Mark Gatiss, and the BBC. The concept of tasting emotions comes from “The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake” by the brilliant Aimee Bender. The plot of this story and any original characters belong to me.

 

“Happiness quite unshared can scarcely be called happiness; it has no taste.”  
-Charlotte Brontë-

* * *

The first time it happened, John was nine years old.

Mum baked a cake. John stood at her elbow, longingly looking up as she smoothed icing over the spongy layers.

“It’s for after tea tonight, John,” she gently scolded him, when his hand sneaked a little too close. John stood there, mumbling feeble apologies. “Oh, alright. We’ll just taste it. Just a little piece.”

She cut out a small wedge, laid it on a plate, gathered forks. John loaded his with a single crumbling bite and devoured it in one mouthful. It was delicious: the right balance of vanilla and sugar and chocolate icing. Surely the best cake Mum had ever made. But from the moment the first morsel touched his tongue, John wanted to spit it out and cry and rinse his mouth with salt water.

“What’s wrong? Did I forget something? Or use salt instead of sugar?” Mum asked. She took a bite of the cake. “Mmm. Nope. Not too bad, is it? But you don’t like it, do you?”

John had no words to explain it to her. How could you tell someone that their cake tasted of heavy, cloying, nauseating sadness? He took another bite to be sure, and the empty loneliness of the cake became even stronger in his mouth. He set his fork down on the plate. “Don’t want to spoil my appetite.”

Mum shrugged, and took a couple more bites of the cake. “If you say so, petal. Why don’t you find Harry? See if she wants any.”

And John went on his way, wondering how someone as outwardly cheerful as Mum could make such a desolate-tasting cake.

From there, the problem intensified. Everything that passed his lips came with a wave of someone else’s emotions. Harry infused all her cooking with discomforting anger and frustration. Dad rarely cooked, but he could make a fairly resigned cuppa with a long, boozy aftertaste if you asked. Granny’s cooking was the best: mostly warmth and good intentions, and the sweetest tinge of longing from when she used to bake for Grandpa. John never told anyone about the emotions in his food. He knew it wasn’t normal to understand how someone felt by the flavour of a roasted chicken or the slather of butter on a slice of bread.

It wasn’t just food. In his teenage years, inexpertly making out with a girl from school in his best friend’s basement, he giddily learned about the taste of another’s mouth and the thrilling sensation of tongues sliding wetly together. And a month later, he learned what it tasted like when affection became disinterest.

John became interested in medicine. It seemed like the only way to understand what he had come to think of as a kind of disorder. But through all of his physiology courses, and even after a brief mention of synaesthesia in one of his neurology classes, he was no closer to understanding _how_ or _why_. He went down a different path. Trauma surgery was fast and frightening and thrilling, so he threw himself into it with reckless abandon. And when he got a day off, he indulged with women and men alike, savouring the briefest encounters and not staying long enough to taste the inevitable disintegration into apathy.

He stayed on at St. Bart’s for a long time, avoiding the real world. When he could progress no further with his education, he worked in an A&E in South London. It bored him. He joined the military because that was what his father did, and his father before, and all down the line of Watsons for a hundred years or more. War broke out, and it was very nearly a relief. John adored Afghanistan from the very first moment he disembarked from the airplane.

He easily could have stayed on base, but instead John volunteered for every patrol that came his way. It felt good to be outdoors and walking in unfamiliar mountains, even knowing that an old Soviet AK-47 could be waiting for him behind every tree and around each bend in the road. He liked the camaraderie of his unit and the profound sense of accomplishment when he prevented one of his mates from bleeding out after an attack. There were bad days, of course, but for John there were many, many good. And then there was the food.

“I don’t know how you can eat this shit,” Murray said to him.

John briefly paused from inhaling a tin of corned beef from his Rat-Pack. “It’s delicious.”

“Obviously we’re not tasting the same thing,” Murray replied, half-heartedly stirring his own tin of beef.

John reflected that he was probably right. To him, the ORPs were wonderful. Everything was manufactured and chemically processed and completely unnatural. Any lingering human emotion in the food was a weak aftertaste. It was the first time in years he had not had an accompanying mouthful of sorrow or joy with each bite. His appetite had never been better, and he gained weight in Afghanistan – muscle, mostly. He was the perfect picture of health and contentment.

Of course, it did not last.

John’s memories of being shot were vague. It was painful: a kind of sudden burning and throbbing, detachedly watching his own blood pump out of his shoulder with every treasonous beat of his heart. There was the drugged helicopter ride back to base, and a few feverish days in an army hospital in Afghanistan where his fellow surgeons tried to stabilize him and repair his shattered shoulder. And then infection set in, and he didn’t remember anything more until he awoke in hospital in England a week later.

Harry took him back to her home, though he didn’t want to go. Clara had left months ago, but all the shades were still drawn in the house, and every surface in the kitchen stank of alcohol. There were nights when John changed his own bandages because Harry was too inebriated to help. And he was hungry, almost constantly, because the grief in Harry’s cooking made it inedible. The sadness in Mum’s cake so many years ago seemed insignificant now.

John moved as soon as he could. Most of his adult life had been divided between London and Afghanistan. He couldn’t return to the Middle East, so he went to London and rented a tiny studio flat with his Army pension. He survived on instant coffee, PG Tips, and discounted fruit and biscuits from the supermarket; his weight, already diminished by illness, decreased even more. Sometimes John looked for work, but mostly he drifted aimlessly through familiar old neighbourhoods and gambled too much of his scarce money on football matches between useless appointments with his therapist. Somehow, upon his return from Afghanistan, his paperwork had become jumbled and no one had asked for his Browning pistol back, so he kept it in a desk drawer and tried not to think about what he would do if he ever picked it up again.

Mike Stamford was a mate from uni, half-forgotten in the decade or more since John had last seen him. He waved off John’s pathetic attempt to pay for his own overpriced cup of exhausted-tasting coffee from the Criterion, saying, “It’s probably my round, anyways. I was terrible, wasn’t I, about buying in uni?”

John cracked a smile for the first time in weeks. “Yeah. Yeah, you were. I seem to remember you mysteriously disappearing to the toilets a few of times when it was your round, and then reappearing a round or two later.”

Mike laughed. “The amount of money I must have saved in those days!”

“A small fortune,” John agreed. “What with the way we drank.”

Mike leaned back. “Good old Bart’s.”

“Are you still at Bart’s, then?”

“Teaching now. Bright young things, like we used to be. God, I hate them!” He laughed again, and for a moment, John was 18 again and in his first year of uni, and he laughed because he was so young and brilliant and going places in his life.

“What about you? Just staying in town ‘til you get yourself sorted?” Mike asked.

“I can’t afford London on an Army pension,” John admitted.

“Ah, and you couldn’t bear to be anywhere else. That’s not the John Watson I know.”

“Yeah, I’m not the John Watson –” John awkwardly cut himself off, shifting his cup of coffee from one hand to the other and trying to ignore the sudden tremor in his fist.

“Couldn’t Harry help?”

“Yeah, like _that’s_ going to happen!” John snapped.

“I dunno – get a flatshare or something?” Mike suggested.

“Come on. Who’d want me for a flatmate?”

Mike grinned. John stared at him for a moment. “What?”

“Well, you’re the second person to say that to me today,” Mike said.

John gave Mike a hard look. “Who was the first?”

Sherlock Holmes was like a battlefield incarnate: chaos and bloodshed and excitement and pure, undiluted intellect. John didn’t need to be told by the threatening stranger in the garage to realize it; he immediately felt a kinship, as if this man was some newly discovered member of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers. It took less than an hour in his company to realize he had his quirks, but John overlooked everything, too thrilled about the sensation of adrenaline pumping through his veins again to care.

They sat in Angelo’s, Sherlock intently gazing out of the window at the street beyond. A waiter set a plate down in front of John with a cursory, “Enjoy.” John peered at the mound of linguine and a slice of bread topped with bruschetta, cautious as always of new chefs and new tastes. One bite of the bread yielded an astringent tang of failed romance, but the linguine was very palatable: sort of warm and… cosy. Fond. Yes. The linguine was fond, John decided.

Sherlock’s eyes briefly slid back to John from the window. “You don’t like the bruschetta.”

“No, it’s fine,” John lied. “Well, it’s not my taste, exactly.”

“Eugenio is the baker here. People come from all across London for his bread,” Sherlock said.

“Oh? Yeah, no, it’s fine. Really.”

Sherlock somehow managed to both stare out of the window and at John at the same time. “You’re a supertaster,” he said.

“What?”

“No. No, that’s not it,” Sherlock corrected himself. “Supertasters are more sensitive to bitter food items – grapefruit juice, coffee, _Brassica oleracea_ cultivars. But you had coffee earlier today, with Stamford; I could still smell it on you when you came into the lab at St. Bart’s. And there’s nothing bitter about bruschetta or bread. And you like the linguine. Angelo made the linguine, and Eugenio made the bread. So there’s something… you’ve somehow tasted a difference between the chef and the baker. Something intrinsic about the food, the flavours.”

“Incredible,” John said. All the years that had gone by, and no one had ever noticed his peculiar attitude towards certain foods. And after three bites in front of Sherlock…

“So what is it?” Sherlock asked.

John shook his head. “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Life is infinitely stranger than the mind of a man could invent,” Sherlock retorted. “Go on. Tell me.”

John sighed. He was reluctant to share, but if he was even going to _consider_ sharing a flat with Sherlock, he would have to get used to having all his secrets uncovered. “Ok. Alright. I can taste emotion in food. The emotions of whoever made the food.”

For a brief second, all of Sherlock’s blinding intensity was focused on John, and then he returned his gaze to the window. “Fascinating.”

“Fascinating? That’s it?” John asked. “That’s all you have to say?”

“I can tell you’re not lying. And it’s as logical an explanation for your aversion to Eugenio’s bread as any. His fiancée just left him; I can only assume it’s come out in his baking, in some way.”

“It’s sour,” John said. “Worse than pure lemon juice and vinegar, combined.”

“Hmm,” Sherlock murmured.

“And Angelo’s linguine is… this will sound ridiculous. It’s fond. He’s very warm, very fond of you.”

“I know,” Sherlock said.

John bit back a chuckle. “This is mad. I’ve never told anyone about this before. It’s always been my freakish secret.”

“Everyone has idiosyncrasies.”

John nodded, speaking between bites of linguine. “Yeah, I suppose. Like you and your archenemy.”

Sherlock didn’t respond.

“People don’t have archenemies.”

Sherlock looked back again. “I’m sorry?”

“In real life. There _are_ no archenemies in real life. Doesn’t happen.”

Sherlock managed to look both disinterested and confused by the remark, coming from John Watson, emotional supertaster, of all people. “Doesn’t it? Sounds a bit dull.”

And Sherlock was anything but dull. After chasing a murderous cabbie across half of London and committing homicide in the course of one night, John really didn’t have any other choice but to move into 221B Baker Street. Anything else would have been boring.

Sherlock was, in many ways, not an ideal flatmate. There was the violin at odd hours, and the occasional severed limb in the refrigerator, and Sherlock’s general intractability and poor behaviour. But he was also brilliant and witty and exciting; he brought John back into the real world and provided him with adventure and distraction when his thoughts began to meander in dark directions. If he never so much as lifted a finger in the kitchen to boil a kettle or arrange a plate of biscuits, well, John was fine with that, too. It was so much less complicated, having someone who knew about his sense of taste, but did nothing to provoke or burden him. Occasionally, John _did_ wonder what Sherlock’s cooking would taste like, since he whole-heartedly claimed that he was a sociopath. But John found that very hard to believe. One bite of toast would have been enough to disprove him, but Sherlock respected John’s boundaries, and so John did likewise.

In time, John would reflect that there was a certain kind of humour in his ability to so completely understand others’ emotions, and yet be so oblivious to his own. Everything came on so gradually that he wasn’t aware until quite late how… _fond_ he had become of Sherlock. Fond to the point where the sight of the man could provoke a lump in his throat and an elevated heart rate. It was difficult work to prevent himself from betraying the new emotions growing in his chest. But it would be pointless, he decided, to try to act on them. Sooner or later, everyone fell out of love. Or they were never in it to begin with. John had had enough partners and failed romances over the years to know that particular lesson a little too well. And then there was always the possibility that Sherlock really _was_ a sociopath, and falling for him would be an exercise in futility. So, he kept up a string of short-term girlfriends and boyfriends and one night stands, and tried to drown his desire for Sherlock in both meaningless relationships and work. Sherlock, so clever about so many other subjects, was curiously clueless about John’s affection, and John was nothing short of grateful for this.

Tensions reached a new high on a blustery November evening, as Sherlock ran after a homicide suspect down a darkened alleyway in Soho, with John trailing behind and DI Lestrade even further back. The suspect had hidden in alcove, and John could only watch as he jumped out, tackled Sherlock, and viciously kicked him in the chest. Sherlock lay supine and unmoving on the pavement. John roared, blood pounding in his ears and right hand grappling for the illegal Browning tucked into his waistband.

“YOU FUCKER,” he shouted. “Get the FUCK down or I _will_ shoot!”

Wheezing slightly, Lestrade came up behind John and carelessly deflected the barrel of the gun by grabbing it with his bare hands. “Fuck’s sake, John! Put that away! I can’t pretend I don’t know you have it if you’re going to constantly flash it about like that!”

The suspect was still sprinting away, but at the end of the alley, a police car with flashing lights pulled up, and several officers jumped out of the car to apprehend the man.

“I radioed ahead,” Lestrade explained. “I was trying to tell you two, but you wouldn’t _listen_! Come on, Sherlock’s not moving. I need you to take a look at him and tell me if we need an ambulance.”

John hid the gun again, and ran to where Sherlock lay. His eyes were closed, but he cracked them open slightly and grinned as John kneeled at his side. “I’m fine,” he croaked.

“Like hell you are,” John said, unbuttoning Sherlock’s coat and running his hand along his ribs, feeling for broken bones as Lestrade stood nearby and watched. “You just took a kick in the chest from a centre forward.”

Sherlock struggled to sit up. “I just had the breath knocked out of me. I’ll be better in a minute.”

“Well, nothing feels broken,” John said. “But I don’t know about bruising…”

“You could have shot first,” Sherlock rather tetchily said. 

“I don’t always just _shoot_ people, Sherlock,” John said.

“I didn’t hear that,” Lestrade interjected.

John ignored him. “You could have _waited_ for me. You _never_ wait. This is how we always end up in these situations.”

Sherlock shoved John off and clambered to his feet, buttoning his coat. “I’m. Fine.”

“This. Yeah. This is it. This is the problem.”

“What?”

“You don’t care!” John shouted at him. “You don’t know what it’s like, seeing someone you _love_ be punted in the chest, and not being able to do anything about it!”

Sherlock stared at John, his face a picture of suspicion and bewilderment.

“What?” John snapped.

Lestrade was trying very hard to keep all emotion off of his face, but there was little smirk growing in the corner of his mouth. “So… an ambulance, lads?”

“No,” Sherlock said.

“Oh, God,” John said, his words finally catching up to his ears.

“Well. I’ll leave you two to sort this out, then, yeah? But I expect to see you both in my office tomorrow, for statements,” Lestrade said, giving an awkward little wave before wandering off to join the other policemen.

“So…” Sherlock said.

“Nope,” John replied. “I… I wasn’t thinking. I didn’t mean it.”

“Didn’t you?”

“I really, really do not want to discuss this. If you’re fine and you don’t want to go to the hospital, then I want to go back to the flat.”

Sherlock shrugged, unconvinced. He led the way back to the high street and flagged down a cab. The entire ride was silent and tense, with Sherlock watching John out of the corner of his eye and John determinedly looking in the other direction and mentally berating himself for his slip of the tongue.

It was past midnight by the time they returned to 221B. John hurtled up the stairs first and slumped into his chair, exhaustedly scrubbing one hand across his face. A few seconds behind him, Sherlock tentatively crept into the apartment, walking on the balls of his feet.

“John,” he called.

“I told you. Not. Now. Really. Not now, Sherlock,” John said.

“I’m…” Sherlock paused. He fiddled with his scarf for a moment, looking almost young and lost.

“It’s fine,” John sighed. “Really. It’s all fine.”

“It is clearly _not_ all fine.”

“I really don’t want to talk about it. Try to get that into your head. In fact, take all the time you want to mull it over. I’m going to bed.”

Sherlock didn’t try to stop him as he made his way upstairs. If he shut the door of his bedroom a little too hard, well, it wasn’t the worst thing to have ever happened in the flat.

It took awhile to fall asleep. John’s mind churned with the events of the night. There had to be some way back to the moment before he opened his mouth and said the thing he could not recant. Or, perhaps Sherlock would dismiss it as sentiment (as it was), and ultimately delete it. That seemed more likely, though he wasn’t exactly willing to bet on it. He finally drifted off, his dreams a troubled synaesthetic muddle of taste and sensation and emotion and a pair of perfectly bowed, untouchable lips.

Sometime in the night, John gradually became aware of another person in his room. He wasn’t alarmed; the overriding impression he felt was disorientation.

“I made tea.”

John blindly turned towards the low rumble, clutching his pillow with one arm. “You never make tea.”

“Hmm,” Sherlock noncommittally replied, setting cup and saucer on the bedside table.

“What time is it?” John asked, weakly lifting his head and attempting to peer at his flatmate through the hazy predawn light.

“Almost five,” Sherlock said. He took one hesitant step forward, paused, and then closed the remaining distance to the bed in a rush, as if the floor was suddenly unbearably hot. Gracelessly, he flopped down next to John. His voice was smothered by the duvet. “Don’t you want your tea?”

“Bloody hell, Sherlock! What are you doing?”

Sherlock gave a dramatic shrug, which was no mean feat while lying face down.

“Is this… um. Are you trying to apologize? Because you really don’t have to. I told you, it’s fine. I don’t expect anything to come of it, anyways. I wasn’t thinking. I just opened my mouth and –”

“Drink the damned tea,” Sherlock murmured.

John shut up. If this was Sherlock’s way of apologizing – or, worse, of being sympathetic – then so be it. Much the better if he could just accept this gesture and then they could forget that yesterday had happened at all. It might even make things better, John reflected. To taste, once and for all, that Sherlock did not care for him, in that way. It would be the conclusive proof he needed to let this go. He reached for the cup, his hand perfectly steady, and frowned. “It’s cold, Sherlock. When did you make this?”

“When we came home.”

“That was hours ago,” John reminded him, in case Sherlock had forgotten again that normal people marked time. Sherlock was utterly still and silent, though, so John gingerly raised the cup to his lips.

For a moment, John’s mind short-circuited. Then, thought rushed back to him all at once: a baffling, tumbling, intense jumble of emotions and sensations and the lingering taste of sugar (but I don’t _take_ sugar in my tea, the last sane bit of his mind echoed from some distant niche) and Sherlock. Sherlock. Sherlock. He latched onto the two syllables, repeating them over and over again, a mantra, a prayer, his entire reason for being.

He didn’t even notice when Sherlock pushed himself upright to watch. “You’re crying,” he said, in that matter-of-fact way that he had.

John touched his cheek, and to his surprise, his fingers came away wet. “I…”

Sherlock reached out and smoothed his hand down John’s face. “It’s all _fine_ , isn’t it?”

“You… you love…” John choked on the words, not trusting himself to complete the sentence. Or, not trusting the sentence to be true when completed.

“I love you,” Sherlock said. He said it as dispassionately as he told wives that their husbands were dead, or husbands that their wives were cheating, or bad news to the hundred other people he had had contact with that year. John wouldn’t have believed him the least bit, if he hadn’t tasted the overwhelming, all-consuming adoration in the cup from which he had just sipped. He still reeled from the intensity of it; there had never been another taste to rival it.

“You’ve never so much as buttered a slice of toast for me,” John dazedly said.

“You would have known,” Sherlock said, letting his hand creep across the duvet to enclose John’s. “From the very first day. From the moment you shot that cabbie. You would have tasted it. I couldn’t bear for you to know, and not care. And I never knew… I never thought you would feel the same way. The one thing I couldn’t deduce about you.”

John squeezed Sherlock’s hand. “Then I’ve been the slow one, again. I didn’t know. Not for a long time. But, I love you. I love you. I love…”

Sherlock abruptly cut him off, those sensuously arched lips gliding over John’s. For an awkward moment, their teeth clacked together, and then Sherlock’s tongue flicked against John’s and John inhaled and all he could taste and think again was _Sherlock, Sherlock, Sherlock_. He savoured every breath and it was a thousand times more intoxicating than morphine and ten thousand times more painful than being shot and he had never felt so damn _happy_ , ever. The teacup spilled onto the duvet, but no one cared, because Sherlock was running his hands across John’s chest and making heady little moans and coming apart at the seams and John’s heart was racing and it was almost too much.

“Sherlock,” John gasped. Sherlock’s skinny chest heaved wildly, and then he collapsed and curled his head into the crook of John’s neck. A wet patch grew on John’s skin, and he suddenly became aware that Sherlock was crying, too. “Oh, God. Oh, Sherlock. Love.”

Sherlock giggled, but it was thin and broken-sounding.

“What’s wrong?” John breathed into Sherlock’s hair.

“I’m scared,” Sherlock said.

For the first time, John could see past all of Sherlock’s defences. The firm avowal that he was a sociopath, the disinterested attitude towards all sentiment… so carefully calculated to keep everyone from getting too close.

“I won’t leave you,” John said. “That’s what you think I do to the people I date. But I never _want_ to leave. I can’t bear… it always hurts, when the other person stops caring, but I still do. It’s always been easier to leave before then, but I don’t want to leave you. Ever. Not even if you stop caring.”

“That’s not what I’m scared of,” Sherlock murmured into John’s neck. “I am going to break you. It’s what I do. I tear people apart. I will care so much that you will _shatter_.”

John’s heart leapt in his chest. Selfless Sherlock. Surely no one else had ever seen him this way. “I’d like to see you try.”

“Don’t make it a challenge, John.”

“Nobody is going anywhere,” John said. “I promise.”

“You can’t promise that.”

John pulled his arms even tighter around Sherlock. “You’re not the only one who’s up for a bit of a challenge.” He nestled his nose into Sherlock’s soft curls and sighed. Sherlock heavily clutched at him, but as the minutes passed, his breath began to even out and his muscles relaxed. John shifted slightly to make himself more comfortable, and then drifted back to sleep with his thigh soaked in cold tea, his chest rising evenly in time his partner’s, and his mouth still full of the overwhelming taste of Sherlock in love.

The sun was out and John was alone when he awoke. He could hear the sounds of Sherlock moving around downstairs. Smiling at the memory of last night, he stripped the duvet from the bed and gathered the teacup and saucer together.

Sherlock had his back turned and was poking at something on the hob when John entered the kitchen.

“What are you doing?” John asked, depositing the cup in the sink. He expected to get an answer along the lines of ‘Braising some cattle eyes in acetic acid, John’ or ‘Melting liposuction fat in the good stainless steel pan, John.’

Sherlock turned to John. The smile on his face was incandescent. “Breakfast, John,” he said, holding out a pan laden with scrambled eggs. And all John could do was laugh and kiss Sherlock again, savouring the infinite love contained within those perfect lips.

**Author's Note:**

> This is a rather strange one. I came up with the idea of a crossover in April or May, and was going to post it on the kink meme. But, then I felt selfish and wanted to write it myself. Originally, Sherlock was supposed to be the one who tasted emotions (that story is still somewhere on my computer). But, for whatever reason, it didn’t work with Sherlock; when I changed it to John, everything fell into place. 
> 
> It's not my first Johnlock story, or even smuttiest thing I've written, but it is the first Johnlock story I've posted on AO3. It's kind of an experiment, to figure out if I can actually write this ship or not.
> 
> Over on tumblr, Callie-Ariane’s "Sherlock" transcripts are invaluable, and Snazzy Cookies has an excellent guide on how to write kissing. FYI, Chris Isaak’s "Wicked Game" is a seriously sexy song and should be required listening when trying to write something romantic.


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